This chapter examines the role of enthymemes in legal argumentation, focusing on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It argues that while legal reasoning is often presented as syllogistic, it should instead be understood as operating through enthymemes, which allow for the strategic omission of premises and the incorporation of implicit assumptions. The chapter analyzes the enthymematic structure of the Dobbs decision, revealing how Justice Alito’s opinion employs unstated premises and narrowly defined categories to overturn Roe v. Wade while maintaining a veneer of logical consistency. The chapter concludes that acknowledging the rhetorical nature of legal argumentation is crucial for understanding the complexities and nuances of judicial decision-making and the interplay between logic, persuasion, and societal values in shaping legal outcomes.

Chapter 6 progresses away from aesthetic judgements in the administration of an international environmental treaty to aesthetic representations made by states in the context of a treaty being enforced. Specifically, it analyses photographs submitted to the International Court of Justice in the Whaling in the Antarctic case by the disputing parties, Australia and Japan. That dispute concerned an exception to bans on whaling for scientific research under the Whaling Convention, one of three treaties examined in the book. The chapter identifies photographs of whales used by the parties before considering their potential role as evidence and as rhetoric. Acknowledging formal practices of the Court that treat images as evidence, it argues that aesthetic theory must be employed to understand the photographs as representations of aesthetic values in law rather than as records of fact. Visual art from Australia and Japan is then analysed to construct meanings of the aesthetic value of whales from the photographs in ways relevant to the parties’ claims. The chapter argues that the Court should recognise the images used in proceedings for their relevance to interpretation of the law.

Pasargada is the fictitious name of a squatter settlement (or favela) in Rio de Janeiro. Because of the structural inaccessibility of the state legal system, and especially because of the illegal character of the favelas as urban settlements, the popular classes living in them devise adaptive strategies aimed at securing the minimal social ordering of community relations. One such strategy involves the creation of an internal legality, parallel to - and sometimes conflicting with - state official legality. This chapter describes Pasargada legality from the inside-through the sociological analysis of legal rhetoric in dispute prevention and dispute settlement and in its (unequal) relations with the Brazilian official legal system. My objective is to reveal many legal experiences that, because they do not fit the legal modernist canon, are ignored, marginalized, silenced, in a word, wasted.